Adxstudio web portal solutions extend Microsoft Dynamics CRM to the web. They deliver a proven and mature web engagement experience for community, public sector, partner management, customer service and a breadth of other solution areas.
Adxstudio's capabilities begin with seamless, extensible out of the box web portals for Dynamics CRM and are built on the Microsoft technology stack including SharePoint, Azure and .NET. Customers can extend their Dynamics CRM solution to the web with Adxstudio portals and create web applications to automate their business processes.
Together with Dynamics CRM, Adxstudio portals create an interactive, web-based engagement platform with capabilities that support profile management, content management, CRM web applications, customer service, government applications, partner management and interactions, channel management and employee interactions.
Adxstudio, a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation, provides both web portal and application lifecycle solutions built for Microsoft Dynamics CRM, SharePoint and .NET platforms.
Note: Microsoft is renaming "Adxstudio Portals" to "CRM portals".
Web Portals Overview
Think of a bank ATM. Before ATM’s, you had to call or visit a bank branch to get information and perform actions. With web portals, banking (and any business/organization) can provide information and allow business transactions to any device (phone, tablets, PCs, etc.).
Any organization can deploy a web portal to enhance customer interactions. Offering a web portal to external individuals can help any business meet their objectives of growth, customer service and efficiency.
Benefits of Web Portals
Scaling service capacity: Since web portals offer self-service functionality, a business can serve a greater number of customers than otherwise possible through traditional support channels.
Increasing customer engagement and satisfaction: Customers who can engage with a business and other customers through the web are more likely to remain a customer and purchase additional products. Allow users to take action to resolve common tasks, ask and answer questions while deepening the relationship with your organization.
Delivering exceptional customer service: When a customer needs information from a business, they want it quickly. Web portals can provide quick and easy self-service solutions.
Improved staff productivity: Customers who can help themselves, and are happy with the results, allow internal employees to handle other business tasks or more difficult customer situations.
Enhanced service quality: Web portals can offer product information, troubleshooting tips, document downloads, videos and many more features to increase the quality of customer service.
Content management: Provide a wide range of digital content to customers including knowledge base articles and media such as video, PDF, Microsoft Office documents, etc.
Seamless customer experience: Beyond the storefront (brick-and-mortar), on-site service and phone, a web portal allows a customer to use any web-enabled device to seamlessly engage with a business at any time
Comprehensive customer platform: Web portals can provide a complete customer experience, from product discovery, research, purchase, support, forums and other types of interactions.
E-mail subscriptions: Customers can sign up for e-mail subscriptions and set other aspects of their profile. This allows a business to tailor content based on the customer's requests, profiler and history.
Track activities: Businesses can gain greater insight into their customers by tracking aspects of a customer portal session such as pages and products viewed, forum posts and ratings.
Community discussion forums: Customers who interact on a web portal can help each other resolve issues, offer tips and advice and thus reduce customer churn or product returns.
And recent reports show that your customers are demanding more ways to interact with your business or organization:
32% of consumers keep in touch with a brand (Sarah Sikowitz, The Customer Life Cycle: A Blueprint for Customer-Obsessed Enterprises, Forrester, January 27, 2016)
50% of end-users use multiple channels to make their voice heard (2015 U.S. State of Multichannel Customer Service Report, Parature)
81% increase in customer use of online forums and communities for self-help (Kate Leggett, Your Customers Don’t Want to Call You, Forrester, February 29, 2016. Percentage increase between 2012 and 2015 surveys)
Get Connected with Customers, Partners and Employees
As highlighted below, providing a web portal to customers, partners, employees and any other individuals outside your organization extends and enhances your investment in CRM.
Build or Subscribe?
Most businesses and organizations can greatly benefit from the investment in a web portal. The question, then, is whether to build a portal or subscribe to or license a configurable cloud or on-premises portal, such as Adxstudio.
Building a web portal from scratch will likely be much more expensive than utilizing a pre-built and configurable solution such as Adxstudio. To build a robust web portal from the ground up requires the attention and expertise of an experienced web application developer(s) and web site designer(s). It will also require months of planning, research, consulting, database design and implementation, software development and integration, site quality assurance and testing. And if the application architect fails to build a site that is easily enhanced, then on-going maintenance will also be time-consuming and expensive.
If a business is already using Dynamics CRM, then the choice is easy...
Reasons to Use Adxstudio Portals
Extend Dynamics CRM to the web to engage customers, partners and employees
Leverage Dynamics CRM as the backend platform for web portal data and eliminate silos of customer data
Use Microsoft Dynamics CRM as a built-in native, modern content publishing for web portals
Market leader for CRM portal solutions
Certified for Microsoft Dynamics CRM
Technical expertise with Dynamics CRM; close collaboration with Microsoft over 8+ years.
Built using the most current software technologies (e.g., HTML5, CSS3), industry trends and Microsoft releases of .NET, Azure and Office 365 and other applications on the Microsoft stack
Brings CRM data to life; make it available to customers, partners, other non-CRM users
No developers (custom code) required; Adxstudio provides point-and-click configuration
Deliver to mobile, tablet and desktop
Maximize the benefit of Microsoft Dynamics CRM
Solid foundation of Authentication, Security, User Roles and Rights, configurable from within Dynamics CRM.
Quick-start solutions (templates) for Customer Service, Self-Service, Public Sector, Partner Channel, Software Vendors, Conferences and Events, Online Retail and more
Integration with SharePoint and Azure
No need for a separate database; uses Dynamics CRM for data storage, workflow processes, plugins, etc.
Join 500+ other businesses and organizations who have improved their customer interactions with Adxstudio
Adxstudio stays current with new technologies, industry trends, and Microsoft releases so that portals continue to run smoothly without customer investment in maintenance.
Here's a look at an out of the box portal running on a variety of devices, deployed quickly and easily by any Dynamics CRM administrator or consultant:
Adxstudio is built with a responsive web design that adapts content to the device resolution and capabilities. The page content flows automatically; one design works on multiple devices and browsers and the design allows for touch control (no keyboard/mouse dependencies) throughout the product.
Major Adxstudio Portal Solutions and Benefits
Self-service
Enable customers or employees to access knowledge as an additional support offering to help meet the desires of users to quickly answer questions with the web enabled device of their choice. Providing knowledge to customers through a portal deflects higher cost support options in the traditional customer service model and allows support agents to focus their time on the more complex issues. With a self-service portal customers receive the support they desire, access to discussion forums that build customer loyalty, visibility into support entitlement data and the ability to provide organizations with feedback through polls, ratings and comments.
Community
When thinking about service strategies, consider the powerful role that community can play by deepening relationships in the community with peer-to-peer knowledge sharing. Users become ambassadors and influencers for an organization, and in return that organization can realize tremendous value in terms of cost-savings, brand loyalty and trust. Create a robust community by enabling discussion forums, create blogs and articles, provide methods for capturing feedback and collect ideas while sharing outcomes of all the community ideas.
Partner
Increase visibility and productivity with a partner channel that is enabled with tools integrated into your CRM system. Strong partner programs enhanced with “one-to-many” self-service options help your partners succeed by providing tools and access to information partners need. These can be delivered with a partner portal that distributes leads, tracks deals and opportunities and provides account management capabilities.
Custom
Built on the Dynamics CRM portal foundation to allow businesses to create a unique solution for their audience to meet the specific requirements of their organization. Leverage pre-built tools or configure custom applications and workflows that connect your business and users with a powerful web engagement portal.
A portals trial for CRM Online 2016 (Update 1 and newer) is available to Microsoft Partners and CRM Customers upon request at https://crmmanagedtrials.dynamics.com/
Free 30-day trial
- In June 2016, Microsoft plans to provide a trial of Adxstudio through a trial instance of CRM Online.
If your organization is using Dynamics CRM Online
Portal Add-On
Decide on Cloud or On-premises hosting
Technical Details
Custom Branding
Every website gets a custom brand
Flexible page layouts
Select from many in-the-box modules, or add your own
Dynamic content is based on CRM data
Unstructured content is controlled by web CMS
You are in full control of what is on every page
Uses Bootstrap framework for easy theming
Standards-based to ensure cross browser, cross platform
Accessibility friendly
Architecture
Authentication and Authorization
Users are stored as CRM contacts. These individuals can self-manage account and profile information.
Login options include username/password or federated authentication such as facebook, Twitter, Microsoft Account, LinkedIn, Google and Yahoo!
Supported authentication protocols: OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, WS-Federation and SAML 2.0. Support for Open ID 2.0 and Azure ACS have been removed for the CRM 2016 Update 1 release.
Deployment
On-premises or hosted
Customization
Liquid is an open-source template language integrated into Adxstudio Portals. It can be used add dynamic content to pages, and to create entire custom templates.
Adxstudio Portals Features
Here's a partial list of the features in Adxstudio Portals (CRM portals):
311 Service Requests
Accessibility
Account Management
Ads
ASP.NET Identity Authentication
Azure Integration
Bing Maps
Blogs
Bootstrap Design
Branding
Careers
Case Deflection
Case Management Contacts
Community Badging
Contact Forms
Content Management and Publishing
Content Search
Custom Templates
Customer and Account Management
Dashboards
Deal Registration & Bidding
Device-Responsive Design
Discussion Forums
Ecommerce Transactions
Editable Content within the Portals
Emergency Management
Entitlements & SLAs
Entity Actions
Entity Forms
Entity Lists
Entity Permissions
Events and Conferences
Feedback
Files, Downloads, Media
Help Desk
Ideas, Issues
Invitations
Knowledge Base and Management
Leads
Links
Location Finder
Multi-Lingual, Multi-Regional Portal Support, Localization into 38 languages
OData Feeds
Open Data Protocol
Opportunity Distribution
Parature Integration
Peer-to-peer communities, interactions
Permissions
Permits, Licenses, Grants
Polls
Products and Catalogs
Quotes, Orders, Invoices
Ratings and Comments
Redirects
Responsive Design
Localization into 38 Languages
Search and SEO
Service Scheduling
SharePoint Integration
Shopping Cart
Sitemap, Customized Layout
Surveys
User Profile Management
Web Design
Web Forms
Web Pages
Web Roles
Web Templating
Web Tools, Custom modules/widgets to meet most portal needs
Workflow Automation
Misc Facts
Installing the "Community Portal" into a Dynamics CRM organization adds 153 new entities to CRM. Fortunately, they all begin with "adx_".
Screenshots
Adxstudio (Portals) links within Dynamics CRM
The Adxstudio "Community" solution installs the CRM ribbon buttons shown below. The ribbon buttons, as well as entities, fields, forms, etc., will vary depending on the Adxstudio solution(s) selected for installation.
Table of Contents
About Adxstudio Portals, from Microsoft
Adxstudio web portal solutions extend Microsoft Dynamics CRM to the web. They deliver a proven and mature web engagement experience for community, public sector, partner management, customer service and a breadth of other solution areas.Adxstudio's capabilities begin with seamless, extensible out of the box web portals for Dynamics CRM and are built on the Microsoft technology stack including SharePoint, Azure and .NET. Customers can extend their Dynamics CRM solution to the web with Adxstudio portals and create web applications to automate their business processes.
Together with Dynamics CRM, Adxstudio portals create an interactive, web-based engagement platform with capabilities that support profile management, content management, CRM web applications, customer service, government applications, partner management and interactions, channel management and employee interactions.
Adxstudio, a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation, provides both web portal and application lifecycle solutions built for Microsoft Dynamics CRM, SharePoint and .NET platforms.
Note: Microsoft is renaming "Adxstudio Portals" to "CRM portals".
Web Portals Overview
Think of a bank ATM. Before ATM’s, you had to call or visit a bank branch to get information and perform actions. With web portals, banking (and any business/organization) can provide information and allow business transactions to any device (phone, tablets, PCs, etc.).Any organization can deploy a web portal to enhance customer interactions. Offering a web portal to external individuals can help any business meet their objectives of growth, customer service and efficiency.
Benefits of Web Portals
And recent reports show that your customers are demanding more ways to interact with your business or organization:
Get Connected with Customers, Partners and Employees
As highlighted below, providing a web portal to customers, partners, employees and any other individuals outside your organization extends and enhances your investment in CRM.Build or Subscribe?
Most businesses and organizations can greatly benefit from the investment in a web portal. The question, then, is whether to build a portal or subscribe to or license a configurable cloud or on-premises portal, such as Adxstudio.Building a web portal from scratch will likely be much more expensive than utilizing a pre-built and configurable solution such as Adxstudio. To build a robust web portal from the ground up requires the attention and expertise of an experienced web application developer(s) and web site designer(s). It will also require months of planning, research, consulting, database design and implementation, software development and integration, site quality assurance and testing. And if the application architect fails to build a site that is easily enhanced, then on-going maintenance will also be time-consuming and expensive.
If a business is already using Dynamics CRM, then the choice is easy...
Reasons to Use Adxstudio Portals
Adxstudio stays current with new technologies, industry trends, and Microsoft releases so that portals continue to run smoothly without customer investment in maintenance.
Here's a look at an out of the box portal running on a variety of devices, deployed quickly and easily by any Dynamics CRM administrator or consultant:
Adxstudio is built with a responsive web design that adapts content to the device resolution and capabilities. The page content flows automatically; one design works on multiple devices and browsers and the design allows for touch control (no keyboard/mouse dependencies) throughout the product.
Major Adxstudio Portal Solutions and Benefits
Self-service
Enable customers or employees to access knowledge as an additional support offering to help meet the desires of users to quickly answer questions with the web enabled device of their choice. Providing knowledge to customers through a portal deflects higher cost support options in the traditional customer service model and allows support agents to focus their time on the more complex issues. With a self-service portal customers receive the support they desire, access to discussion forums that build customer loyalty, visibility into support entitlement data and the ability to provide organizations with feedback through polls, ratings and comments.Community
When thinking about service strategies, consider the powerful role that community can play by deepening relationships in the community with peer-to-peer knowledge sharing. Users become ambassadors and influencers for an organization, and in return that organization can realize tremendous value in terms of cost-savings, brand loyalty and trust. Create a robust community by enabling discussion forums, create blogs and articles, provide methods for capturing feedback and collect ideas while sharing outcomes of all the community ideas.Partner
Increase visibility and productivity with a partner channel that is enabled with tools integrated into your CRM system. Strong partner programs enhanced with “one-to-many” self-service options help your partners succeed by providing tools and access to information partners need. These can be delivered with a partner portal that distributes leads, tracks deals and opportunities and provides account management capabilities.Custom
Built on the Dynamics CRM portal foundation to allow businesses to create a unique solution for their audience to meet the specific requirements of their organization. Leverage pre-built tools or configure custom applications and workflows that connect your business and users with a powerful web engagement portal.Adxstudio Case Studies
Grand Rapids, Michigan - 311 Portal
Built for Growth, Elections Saskatchewan’s Website Scales to 33 Thousand Page Views on Election Day
Experlogix Enables Unassisted Customer Quotes, Orders & Case Management with Adxstudio Portals
Gap Consulting Standardizes on Adxstudio Portals as the Platform for their Feature Rich Portals Solutions
San Diego County Public Safety Group Emergency Website Disaster-Ready, Scales to 19 Million Page Views Hourly
Starshot Unlocks the Web Potential of Microsoft Dynamics CRM with Adxstudio Portals and Microsoft Windows Azure
Adxstudio provides their own case study as well; their website is built with Adxstudio portals software.
Additional Resources
Product Videos
https://www.youtube.com/user/adxstudioMicrosoft Dynamics CRM Online 2016 Update 1 Architecture
Training
http://community.adxstudio.com/learning/https://community.adxstudio.com/learning/training-curriculum/
Technical Guides
Administrator's Guide to portal capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics CRMAdxstudio Portal Sites
Hillsborough County 311 PortalPricing
https://www.adxstudio.com/adxstudio-portals/pricing/A portals trial for CRM Online 2016 (Update 1 and newer) is available to Microsoft Partners and CRM Customers upon request at https://crmmanagedtrials.dynamics.com/
Free 30-day trial
- In June 2016, Microsoft plans to provide a trial of Adxstudio through a trial instance of CRM Online.
How to Get Started with an Adxstudio CRM Portal
If you just want to try out Adxstudio Portals:If your organization is using Dynamics CRM Online
Portal Add-On
Decide on Cloud or On-premises hosting
Technical Details
Custom Branding
Architecture
Authentication and Authorization
Deployment
On-premises or hostedCustomization
Liquid is an open-source template language integrated into Adxstudio Portals. It can be used add dynamic content to pages, and to create entire custom templates.Adxstudio Portals Features
Here's a partial list of the features in Adxstudio Portals (CRM portals):Misc Facts
Screenshots
Adxstudio (Portals) links within Dynamics CRM
The Adxstudio "Community" solution installs the CRM ribbon buttons shown below. The ribbon buttons, as well as entities, fields, forms, etc., will vary depending on the Adxstudio solution(s) selected for installation.